Get to know the Judges
Our panel of judges includes industry leaders, innovators, and trailblazers in CX and technology.
Meet the Head Judges
The Leader of the Year Award
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A highly influential freelance CX consultant, Ian advises leading companies on CX strategy, measurement, improvement and employee advocacy techniques and solutions. To date, Ian has worked in 61 countries across multiple industries including retail, financial services, logistics, manufacturing, telecoms and pharmaceuticals deploying CX tools and methodologies. An internationally renowned speaker and blogger on the subject of CX, Ian was also the first to become a CCXP (Certified Customer Experience Professional) Authorised Resource & Training Provider and is the chair and host of CX awards programmes around the world.
The Employee Experience Award
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Diane Magers is an international speaker, passionate best-selling author, recognised thought leader, and advisor on Experience Management (XM). She is a founding member and former Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) CEO. She is a CCXP and holds an MBA and an MS in psychology. She is also the founder and CEO of Experience Catalysts, an experience management advisory and coaching firm.
The Rising Star Award
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Described as an experimental CX thought leader and visionary, Adrian Swinscoe is a best-selling author, Forbes contributor, speaker, investor, advisor and aspirant CX Punk.
He has been growing and helping develop customer-focused large and small businesses for over 25 years now.
His clients have included brands such as Adobe, Apple, Costa Coffee, ING, Intercontinental Hotel Group, KFC, KPMG, ING, Lloyds, Harper Collins, Médecins Sans Frontières, Nespresso, Olympus, Pearson, Philips, Sky and Zoom, as well as numerous tech vendors and many smaller and medium-sized businesses.
The Responsible AI Award
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Shameem is a senior GTM leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a recognised expert in Customer Experience, AI and digital transformation. With deep expertise spanning contact centres, AI and customer experience, she works with organisations to turn emerging technologies into strategic opportunities that deliver measurable business and customer outcomes.
Her experience spans go-to-market strategy, market expansion and technology adoption, with a particular focus on how organisations can use AI and innovation to transform the customer experience. She is also a strong advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, and for creating greater opportunities for women in technology.
As a judge, Shameem brings a valuable perspective at the intersection of CX, technology and business transformation — with the commercial insight to assess not only what is innovative, but what creates meaningful and lasting impact for customers, people and organisations.
The Ally of the Year Award
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Representing the brain and constantly asking the "human" questions very few of us think about in customer and employee experience, Sandra Thompson is an "empathy expert" (a title bestowed on her) and a scholar and teacher of psychology and neuroscience in the customer and employee space.
Sandra designs and delivers learning experiences, she lectures, she gives inspiring keynote speeches, occasionally coaches, and she's written a practical guide to become more emotionally intelligent.
On a mission to create greater connection, she's partnered with an amazing human to run EQ and communication programmes.
The Experience Design Award
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Megs Armor is an internationally experienced design and CX leader with 12 years’ experience across Deloitte Digital, EY, Accenture Song and Lloyds Banking Group. She has built and scaled design practices, led teams of more than 30 designers, partnered with founders to take products from 0–1, and coached design and CX leaders globally.
At EY and Lloyds Banking Group, Megs led large-scale design teams delivering omnichannel services used by more than 8 million customers. She has also embedded enterprise-wide journey management systems and CX frameworks, helping organisations connect customer needs with product, design and business outcomes at scale.
Megs has also partnered with early-stage founders to design, build and launch products across fintech and AI. She is a strong advocate for a new generation of design leaders who combine strategic leadership with hands-on building — using AI to raise the quality of design and create experiences that put customers at the heart of business decisions.
The Customer Champion Award
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Ejieme Eromosele is an award-winning Customer Experience and Customer Success executive who has led customer programs for Fortune 500 companies, The New York Times, and startups. She specializes in customer-led growth, building customer success programs, and expanding global operations. As Founder of Success in Black, she champions Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Customer Success. A board member, speaker, and angel investor, she advises pre-seed and seed-stage startups. She holds a BA in Economics and an MBA in Strategy & Global Business from NYU.
The Industry Impact Award
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Head of Consulting for award winning Lexden CX (2007). Recognised as CX Today's 2024 CX Leader's CX Influencer of the Year and 2024 CX Culture Champion of the Year. Winner of International CX Awards GOLD for B2B Marketing. Founder of the Customer Experience World Games Foundation.
Helping CX leaders and teams elevate their customer experience excellence to be a leading business practice through customer centricity in their organisations.
The Customer Insight and Intelligence Award
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Zack Hamilton is a distinguished retail and eCommerce strategist renowned for his transformative leadership as Chief Experience & Strategy Officer. With over two decades of deep retail expertise, Zack has become a pivotal figure in shaping the future of customer experience, employee experience, and post-purchase experience strategies for global brands. As an eCommerce visionary, Zack has been instrumental in developing and implementing digital-first strategies that seamlessly blend online and offline retail experiences. His innovative approaches have consistently driven significant improvements in customer acquisition, conversion rates, and lifetime value across digital platforms. Zack has advised over 200 retail brands worldwide, including industry giants like Walmart, Macy's, and SEPHORA, on creating cohesive omnichannel experiences.
He’s also author of the Experience Performance System TM and host of the ‘Unf*cking your CX’ podcast.
The Customer Experience Transformation Award
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Olga Potaptseva is a globally recognised strategist specialising in customer-informed operating models for large organisations across Europe and the Middle East. A Top 15 Global CX Influencer, she partners with C-suite leaders to transform structures through deep research and experience management. With 20+ years of leadership, she bridges strategy and operations. From pharmaceutical supply models and OPEX savings to higher insurance retention and doubled banking conversions. By combining human insight, AI enablement and strong change management, she reduces burnout and builds future-ready organisations.
Abisola Fagbiye
The Responsible AI Award
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Abisola Fagbiye is a CX Strategist, keynote speaker, and founder with a decade of experience building customer experience functions across multiple markets. She scaled a CS team from a single hire to 10 across multiple countries. Through Abisola Fagbiye Ltd, she builds CX solutions that solve problems for SMBs, including Unscrpt, the Human Check, and another retention-churn solution in the works. She brings a distinct lens to CX, seeing every customer interaction as a canvas, and mentors emerging women talent through Wentors, WILAN Global, and Black Girls in Tech.
Amandine Le Doze
The Customer Experience Transformation Award
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Amandine Le Doze is a Customer Experience, Operations & Transformation leader with 8 years’ experience across travel tech and retail. Most recently Head of Customer Experience at Kiwi.com, a global travel-tech platform, she led a global CX function, built the company’s Voice of Customer operating model and played a key role in rebuilding customer trust. Her work focuses on turning customer insight into business action, transforming complex customer journeys and driving cross-functional change across organisations.
Anne Dawson
The Employee Experience Award
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Anne is excited to be a returning judge for the Inspiring Women in CX Awards! She brings over a decade of experience to her role in the field of employee development & training. With a robust educational background, including a Master's in Organisational Management, she is known for her collaborative approach, working closely with executive leadership to identify knowledge and skills gaps within the workforce and develop formal blended training programs to address these needs, ultimately driving organisational success through strategic talent development initiatives.
Birgit Goelen
The Customer Champion Award
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Birgit Goelen is Head of Customer Excellence at Plandisc, part of Visma. Her path went from Belgium to Denmark, and from marketing into leading customer-facing teams. Today she owns the full post-sale journey: Customer Success, Support and Experience. She’s built and scaled teams from the ground up, focusing on the bigger picture: strategy, structure and making sure her people have what they need to thrive, so their customers feel supported too. Loyalty follows trust, and trust is built long before a renewal conversation. That's why she believes CX belongs to every team, with mine in the front seat, setting the example.
Elsa Tranquillo
The Ally of the Year Award
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Moving from Italy to the Netherlands, Elsa has worked in customer success and account management across drones, freight forwarding and container shipping. Different products, similar work underneath. She has been working across cultures and languages: Italian, English and increasingly Dutch, from B2C to B2B portfolios in international teams.
She is a cooperative person who believes in encouraging others to succeed and grow in their role; from supporting a colleague at work to sharing her knowledge through podcasts.
Outside work, she volunteers as a mentor to orient young professionals in the Dutch job market.
Funda Whitaker
The Customer Insight and Intelligence Award
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Funda has a keen interest in understanding humans. Coming from a market research background and transitioning into customer experience insights, she found herself in the perfect arena to explore organisations' customers, their needs and expectations, and how they perceive their experiences. She enjoys connecting customer insights with business strategies and action plans to enable the right prioritisation for the right actions at the right time for the right customer, for the desired business outcomes. She uses market research to further explore and recommend experience improvement strategies. After all, she believes humans are at the centre!
Ginger Conlon
The Ally of the Year Award
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Ginger Conlon is an award-winning content and customer marketing executive. As director of customer stories at Genesys, she drives strategic storytelling initiatives and leads the Orchestrators Innovation Awards. Previously, she’s held editorial leadership roles at leading B2B media brands, including 1to1 Media, CRM magazine, and The Drum. A founding board member of CXPA, Ginger has been recognised as one of Women in CX's Awesome Women to Follow in CX, the #1 CX Industry Influencer by Customer Experience Magazine’s CXMStars Awards, and a recipient of the Marketing Club of New York’s Silver Apple lifetime achievement award.
Huda Parkar
The Industry Impact Award
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When businesses invest in AI and contact centre technology, value is lost in the space between what gets promised, what gets built, and what actually gets adopted.
Huda is passionate about contact centre and AI technology. She’s spent 17 years closing that space, from the partner, vendor and customer side: hands-on implementation and technical delivery, programme management of large-scale transformation, and strategic customer success at C-suite level.
That end to end perspective is rare, and it's the lens she bring as a judge: a grounded view of what great CX actually looks like in practice, not just on paper.
Karyn Furstman
The Ally of the Year Award
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Karyn built CustomersFurst to do what four decades of frontline CX leadership made clear was rare: advise executives not just on strategy, but on how to make customer experience stick across the organisation. Before founding the firm, Karyn held multiple Chief Customer Experience Officer in industries where the gap between customer promise and operational reality tends to be widest. Karyn focuses on helping CX leaders move from functional competence to organisational influence — translating customer insight into financial value the CFO and board will recognise.
Kerry Sudale
The Industry Impact Award
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Founder of Sudale Search, Kerry is dedicated to putting the human back into executive search across Customer Experience and Customer Operations. Rather than recycling the same familiar hires from the same big brands, she solves complex leadership puzzles by finding agile leaders who solve real challenges and build thriving frontline cultures. A passionate advocate for storytelling and meaningful DE&I in business, she champions authentic, transformative talent.
Kilver Sidhu
The Customer Champion Award
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Kilver Sidhu is a customer experience and operations leader with over 26 years in financial services. She has led large multi-site teams, transformed specialist support journeys, and consistently delivered strong customer outcomes with high engagement cultures. She is passionate about inclusive leadership, practical innovation, and raising industry standards for vulnerable and specialist customers.
Lara Husselbee
The Rising Star Award
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Lara is the founder of Lara Husselbee PTY LTD, a Sydney-based strategy, service and experience consultancy working for global clients.
She works with clients across health, wellness, financial services, tech and government, building genuine capability and confidence in the people leading transformations and future-proofing their organisations.
Lara designs better ways to work, connect and grow, working with people to take charge of change and design it for themselves, starting her practice to use her craft on her own terms.
Lara Khouri
The Rising Star Award
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Lara has spent her corporate career inside blue-chip multinationals driving transformation from the inside: reducing customer churn to zero, turning a fully funded department into a seven-figure revenue function within a year while retaining 100% of staff through restructures that usually cost people their jobs, and increasing efficiency by 60%. That pattern, real numbers achieved without sacrificing the people or values behind them, is what led her to found There Is No Spoon and develop The Integrity Gap, a framework for closing the space between what organisations claim about their people and planet commitment.
Lauretta Campestre
The Responsible AI Award
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Lauretta Campestre is a customer success and transformation leader with more than 20 years of experience helping organisations turn customer conversations into strategic business value. As VP of Success Strategy at CallMiner, she partners with leading brands to leverage intelligent CX automation, uncover actionable insights, and drive measurable outcomes across customer experience, operations, and revenue growth. Lauretta is passionate about helping organisations accelerate innovation, realise value faster, and transform customer intelligence into a competitive advantage.
Leonora Gouviea
The Responsible AI Award
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Leonora Gouveia is a Senior Business Solutions Manager at SAS and a recognised Customer Experience and MarTech professional with over two decades of experience across customer intelligence, digital transformation, marketing automation, and omnichannel engagement. She has supported organisations across multiple industries and regions in delivering customer-centric strategies that generate measurable business value. As a Women in CX community member and industry speaker, Leonora is passionate about championing innovation, professional development, and greater diversity within the CX industry.
Lina Yahya
The Leader of the Year Award
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Lina doesn’t just talk about customer experience; she builds it into how organisations actually work. With 25+ years across strategy, product, sales & CX, she specialises in connecting customer value, employee behaviour, operational delivery & regulatory expectations.
Today, Lina’s focus is on what’s next: changing the measurement scene. Through the change cue, she’s developing connected models that move beyond siloed KPIs, linking behaviour with emotion at key moments to predict friction earlier & drive outcomes. Her aim is to help companies sustain change in an AI-driven, multi-channel world, one cue at a time.
Linda Howard
The Customer Insight and Intelligence Award
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Linda is passionate about creating exceptional client experiences that drive employee loyalty while improving financial performance. With a background in market research consultancy and implementing in-house Voice of the Customer programs, she has experience in a range of industries and currently focuses on accounting and advisory services.
Linda leads with empathy and prioritises health and wellness. She is also a certified British Wheel of Yoga instructor.
Lindsey Watson
The Experience Design Award
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Lindsey Watson is CX Director at Host & Stay, where she leads the Owner Care, Guest Care and Customer Resolution teams.
She started out answering calls in an insurance call centre and worked through hospitality and contact centre management before moving into CX. No qualification, no template, and a function she had to build herself. Promoted twice in three years, she has rebuilt complaint handling, improved review scores and brought owner attrition down.
She spent a long time being the harshest voice in the room about her own work, and now tells women earlier in the journey to back themselves sooner!
Marta Duchai
The Employee Experience Award
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Marta is an independent CX and online reputation expert with over 20 years of experience in tourism, service development and organisational learning. Her mission is to ensure that decision-makers understand the organisation-wide impact of CX and learn to think through a customer experience lens. She turns complex CX principles and customer insights into clear, practical methods that leaders and teams can confidently apply in their everyday work.
Oana Man-Kesselheim
The Experience Design Award
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Oana turns customer experience into measurable competitive advantage in Romania and globally. At Endava (NYSE: DAVA), she implemented the global Voice of Customer programme, elevating customer satisfaction to a Board-level strategic objective. In 2023, Vestbee, CEE's largest start-up and investor platform, named her among 20 Romanians in "Top Women Romania" for her contribution to the start-up ecosystem. Her paper on measuring customer satisfaction in marketing strategy was published at the 2024 Marketing from Information to Decision Conference, Cluj-Napoca. She balances family, business and learning, and loves the outdoors.
Olena Rozenova
The Leader of the Year Award
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Olena Rozanova is a CX and marketing expert with 20+ years of experience helping businesses build meaningful connections through design thinking and service design. Her career spans marketing, sales, business development and CX across banking (Rosbank, Societe Generale), property management (Colliers, JLL, DTZ), and now Lloyd's Register, the oldest maritime classification society. She believes every business, regardless of size, can deliver exceptional, human-centred experiences. Working across markets and cultures, she redesigns products and services around local nuance, pairing human connection with technology to drive growth.
Olivia Hogg
The Rising Star Award
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Olivia is passionate about creating exceptional customer experiences through empathy, meaningful human connections, and ensuring teams are equipped with the right tools and support to deliver remarkable service. Her experience includes facilitating customer journey mapping sessions, conducting interviews and surveys to uncover actionable customer insights, and supporting the rollout of company-wide service excellence training for frontline employees.
She holds an Honours Bachelor of Applied Science in Psychology with Distinction and a Certificate in Organisational Behaviour from the University of Guelph-Humber.
Rose Clarkson
The Leader of the Year Award
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Rose’s background spans product, design, technology, and operations, and she’s passionate about designing a more equitable future. When she leaves this earth, she hopes someone might write on her grave, “She made quiet voices a little louder”. She’s working on living up to that.
Shikha Gupta
The Customer Experience Transformation Award
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Shikha leads Continuous Improvement globally at Align Technology, as part of the CI & Customer Experience organisation, with a remit spanning EMEA, the Americas, and APAC. She drives large-scale order-to-cash, service, and CX transformation programmes, embedding operational excellence and customer-centricity across the business.
A certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Scrum Master, Shikha combines rigorous process discipline with a forward-looking approach to technology. She is an AI champion within Align, leading adoption of AI tools across commercial and operations teams and speaking to large internal audiences.
Siobhain Goodall
The Customer Experience Transformation Award
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Siobhain is a Senior Client Executive with extensive experience in BPO and Customer Experience Management (CXM), helping organisations transform customer operations through AI adoption, technology enablement and right-shoring strategies. She specialises in driving new business growth, building long-term client partnerships and designing scalable service solutions that balance customer experience, operational efficiency and commercial outcomes. Her expertise spans transformation, outsourcing strategy, global delivery models and stakeholder management.
Sophie Chkhaberidze
The Customer Experience Transformation Award
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Sophie Chkhaberidze is a Customer Experience and Human-Centred Transformation leader shaping experience strategy across public and private sectors in Georgia and internationally. With 18+ years of experience, she connects customer, employee, patient, brand and digital experience with strategy, leadership and organisational capability to create measurable impact. She serves as President of XMGlobal Collaborative Georgia Chapter and Partner & CX Consultant at Lexden. Ranked #12 among the Top 150 Customer Experience Professionals globally (CXMStars 2026), Sophie advances experience excellence and human-centred practice.
Stephanie Linville
The Industry Impact Award
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Stephanie Linville, CCXP, is an award-winning CX leader who helps organisations turn customer insights into enterprise strategy, growth and loyalty. With more than 20 years of experience leading large-scale CX and digital transformations, she is known for building high-performing teams, nurturing customer-centric cultures, and driving measurable business impact. She is currently the Global Customer Experience Leader at Corteva Agriscience and partners with local teams around the world to embed customer intelligence into decisions that strengthen commercial excellence capabilities and support sustainable business success.
Susanna Baque
The Customer Champion Award
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Susanna is Senior Director of Customer Experience at SCIEX, with more than 25 years of global leadership across customer experience, sales, technical support, and market development. A PhD scientist turned CX strategist, she leads enterprise-wide transformation that strengthens customer loyalty, operational excellence, and business growth. Internationally recognized for CX excellence in Culture and Inclusion, Susanna brings strategic judgment, executive perspective, and proven customer-led and people-centered leadership with a passion for empowering others, consistently creating meaningful impact across the business.
Tiahna McDowell
The Employee Experience Award
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Tiahna McDowell is a CX Strategist and Transformation PM. With more than 20 years of experience across the software, SaaS, and technology industries. She leads enterprise CX strategy, governance, Voice of the Customer, and transformation initiatives that connect customer insights to measurable business outcomes, including adoption, retention, and satisfaction. She is passionate about developing leaders, fostering customer-centric cultures, and driving cross-functional collaboration that delivers meaningful, lasting impact for customers and businesses alike.
Vicky Hampson
The Leader of the Year Award
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Vicky Hampson is Chief of All Things Performance and Impact at Victorious Consulting, helping commercial leaders and their teams build the capabilities needed to perform, grow and thrive. Drawing on three decades of commercial leadership across sales, marketing, CX and organisational transformation, she has led CX-driven change programmes for global businesses. A dedicated mentor and advisory board member, Vicky's passionate about developing tomorrow's commercial leaders who can leverage their own value. Based in the Netherlands, she is delighted to judge the Women in CX Awards 2026 and champion the wider WiCX community.
Weronika Rosiak-Jedz
The Experience Design Award
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Weronika Rosiak-Jedz is a Customer Experience and Total Experience expert specializing in Customer Journey and experience design. She works with organizations across finance, banking, fintech, IT, healthcare, energy, insurance, real estate, public services and non-profit sectors. She is a CX competition judge, industry speaker, author of CX publications and postgraduate CX lecturer. Winner of Customer Experience World Games 2023 and judge in 2024, she was also recognized as an Awesome Woman to Follow in CX.
Dr. Yazmin Rodriguez
The Customer Insight and Intelligence Award
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Customer Experience leader, researcher, speaker, and consultant with 30+ years of experience across the automotive and telecommunications industries. Yazmin currently serves as CX Manager for Puerto Rico’s largest automotive dealership group and consults independently through PR Networking. Her doctoral research examined CX management and customer loyalty in Puerto Rico’s automotive industry. A NADA 2026 speaker returning in 2027, she champions human-centred CX, VoC, intrapreneurship, leadership, and continuous improvement.
Timeline of Events
September 10th, 2026
October 16th, 2026
November 2nd, 2026
December 1st, 2026
Nominations Open
Nominations Close
Finalists Announcement
Winners Announced